16th May 2018

13 June 2018 | 2-7pm

Queen Anne Building, Room 175, Park Row, Greenwich, London SE10 9LS

This seminar – convened by ISRF Political Economy Research Fellow Dr Emanuele Lobina – revolves around the state and possible evolution of the public vs. private debate in water and other public services. It does so by presenting the results of the Dr Lobina’s ISRF Fellowship project on Reorienting Industrial Organisation Theory: From Necessary to Possible Outcomes and with the contribution of prominent scholars in the field.

20th March 2018

13 April – 28 June 2018

The Peace Museum, Bradford, 10 Piece Hall Yard, BD1 1PJ

The work of ISRF Early Career Fellow Dr Jill Gibbon will form a new temporary exhibition opening at The Peace Museum on 13th April, and running until 28th June 2018.

The UK government has approved weapon sales to two thirds of the countries on its own list of human rights abusers. Sales of bombs and missiles to Saudi Arabia have soared since the start of the Yemen War, where hundreds of children and thousands of civilians have been killed in airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition. How are such sales legitimised?

For the past ten years Jill Gibbon has visited arms fairs in Europe and the Middle East, by masquerading as an arms trader with a suit, paste pearls, and a sham business. Once inside, she draws and collects complementary gifts. Here, weapons glimmer under spotlights, waiting staff hover with champagne, beer, and pretzels, and a string quartet plays Mozart on the back of a military truck. The exhibition explores the etiquette of the arms trade through drawings, gifts, and elements of her masquerade.

Launch Event: Friday 13th April, 5pm -7pm

This will be a free drop in event to celebrate the opening of the new exhibition. Refreshments will be provided – everybody welcome.

3rd March 2018

ISRF Political Economy Fellow Dave Elder-Vass writes the Materially Social blog, sharing his academic work in progress – ideas under development, comments on papers or presentations, thoughts prompted by teaching and students, and responses to discussions in the literature and the blogosphere.

In the first output from his ISRF-funded project – Constructing Financial Value – introduce the key elements of an alternative theory of value.

There are two dominant existing theories of value: the Marxist theory and the theory implicit in mainstream economics. In my book Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy I criticised Marx’s labour theory of value in detail, but here we can focus on just one issue. One of the mystifying things about Marx’s theory is that although he tells us how he thinks the value of a thing is determined – by the socially necessary amount of labour time required to produce it – he never tells us what value actually IS. It seems to be something to do with price, but he’s quite insistent that it’s not exactly the same thing as price. It’s clear, however, that he thinks that the value of a thing is an objective quantity, determined by objective features of the social world and independent of individual perceptions.

28th February 2018

20 March 2018 | 1-5pm

Birkbeck, University of London – Room 101, 30 Russell Square, London

ISRF Editorial Assistant, Dr Rachael Kiddey, will take part in the panel discussion “What does good interdisciplinary research look like? Views from research evaluators” at Birkbeck, University of London on Tuesday 20th March 2018.

The most complex economic challenges of our time – such as ageing population, climate change, the effects of automation and globalisation – result from interlinked scientific, technical, social and individual processes, a comprehensive understanding and addressing of which require interdisciplinary approaches. Besides addressing complex challenges, interdisciplinary research is also particularly likely to produce radically novel outcomes that create innovation opportunities. Policymakers advocate greater interdisciplinarity within academia, calling for more interdisciplinary research centres, for greater funding of interdisciplinary research, and for better ways to map and measure interdisciplinary engagement and outputs.

However, universities are historically not well equipped to support interdisciplinary research, and the incentive systems that underpin most academic activities – including funding, evaluation, academic communication, publishing and career progression – militate against it. Institutions that wish to encourage more interdisciplinarity need to implement adequate initiatives to support it. This workshop intends to bring together experts engaged in the practice, study and evaluation of interdisciplinary research, in order to uncover challenges and best practices in supporting interdisciplinarity within academia.

26th February 2018

15 March 2018 | 7pm

Swedenborg House, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH

A book by former ISRF Mid-Career Fellow Dr Lisa Baraitser will launch at Swedenborg House in London on Thursday 15th March 2018.

Celebrating the publication of Enduring Time, a panel of scholars (Laura Salisbury, Stella Sandford and Raluca Soreanu) will engage with the book to consider the changing ways we imagine and experience time. Climate change, unending violent conflict, fraying material infrastructures, permanent debt and widening social inequalities mean that we no longer live with an expectation of a progressive future, a generative past, or a flourishing now that characterized the temporal imaginaries of the post-war period. Time, it appears, is not flowing, but has become stuck, intensely felt, yet radically suspended. The question the book raises is how we might now ‘take care’ of time? How can we understand change as requiring time not passing? What can quotidian experiences of suspended time – waiting, delaying, staying, remaining, enduring, returning and repeating – tell us about the survival of social bonds? And how might we re-establish the idea that time might be something we both have and share, as opposed to something we are always running out of?

The ISRF Book Launch Fund is available to existing or previous ISRF award recipients, who may apply for one grant of up to £500 towards the cost of holding an event at which their book (or a book to which they have contributed significantly) is launched.

26th February 2018

8 March 2018 | 5pm

De Montfort University

A book co-edited with Professor Richard Hall by former ISRF Flexible Grants for Small Groups recipient Dr Joss Winn will launch at De Montfort University in Leicester on Thursday 8th March 2018.

The context for the book is that higher education across the globe is in crisis. The idea of the public university is under assault, and both the future of the sector and its relationship to society are being gambled. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable, its historic institutions are becoming untenable, and their purpose is resolutely instrumental. What form does intellectual leadership take in addressing these issues and in revealing possible alternatives? The contributors argue that mass higher education is at the point where it no longer reflects the needs, capacities and long-­term interests of global society. An alternative role and purpose is required, based upon ‘mass intellectuality’ or the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge.

As editors, Richard and Joss will provide an overview of the context and key themes from the book. Liz will act as a respondent, analysing the application of these themes to life inside the University, and for educational projects outside. The session will critique intellectual leadership in the university, exploring ongoing efforts from around the world to create alternative models for organizing higher education and the production of knowledge. We will ask: is it possible to re­imagine the university democratically and co­operatively? If so, what are the implications for leadership not just within the university but also in terms of higher education’s relationship to society?

The ISRF Book Launch Fund is available to existing or previous ISRF award recipients, who may apply for one grant of up to £500 towards the cost of holding an event at which their book (or a book to which they have contributed significantly) is launched.

The music industry is a significant economic sector that ought to provide earning opportunities for a wide variety of young people who have the necessary skills, interests and talents. And yet, this sector has some of the lowest diversity rates in terms of ethnicity and class. By contrast, Grime, and the wider urban music economy, can offer a multiplicity of routes into the creative and cultural industries for diverse and disadvantaged groups.

From its London origins, Grime has expanded regionally through the Eskimo Dance and Sidewinder events, and from Lord of the Mics MC clashes to the nascent Grime Originals events, the Grime economy has a national (UK) and international reach.

25th January 2018

5-6 April 2018

CRASSH, University of Cambridge

This conference brings together perspectives from clinical research, medical practice, philosophy, health economics and psychology to explore what makes cancer so special. Is the current amount of funding for cancer research and treatment justifiable? Are existing arrangements consistent with public perceptions of cancer, and what can the lived experience of actual patients, carers and clinicians teach us? Where is cancer research, treatment and policy going? This conference provides an opportunity to examine whether the special status of cancer is justifiable, and to explore the implications for the future of medicine.

16-17 April 2018

CRASSH, University of Cambridge

Crosscurrents of Commensuration will explore commensuration – in its widest possible sense – as a focus of critical analysis across the social sciences and humanities. Construed broadly, commensuration involves equating units or entities judged in the first instance to be essentially different and incomparable with one another. Such operations of same-making – along with corollary processes of differentiation and distinction – are fundamentally generative aspects of sociocultural life, and have proven to be highly fecund as both objects and optics of analysis across the social sciences and humanities.

This two-day event will bring together researchers from across the social sciences and humanities to consider commensuration from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives with the aim of broadening and deepening the critical scope of commensuration as an optic of social analysis. What arises at the intersection of different ways of thinking about commensuration and its cognates? How might different disciplinary approaches to commensuration and cognate problematics enrich and inform one another?

Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge

The book – Studying Arctic Fields: Cultures, Practices, and Environmental Sciences – portrays “the social lives of scientists at Resolute in Nunavut and their interactions with logistical staff and Inuit,” through which “Powell demonstrates that the scientific community is structured along power differentials in response to gender, class, and race. To explain these social dynamics the author examines the history and vision of the Government of Canada’s Polar Continental Shelf Program and John Diefenbaker’s “Northern Vision,” combining ethnography with wider discourses on nationalism, identity, and the postwar evolution of scientific sovereignty in the high Arctic. By revealing an expanded understanding of the scientific life as it relates to politics, history, and cultures, Studying Arctic Fields articulates a new theory of field research.”

The ISRF Book Launch Fund is available to existing or previous ISRF award recipients, who may apply for one grant of up to £500 towards the cost of holding an event at which their book (or a book to which they have contributed significantly) is launched.

7th November 2017

ISRF Political Economy Research Fellow Emanuele Lobina will give a talk – Beyond The Failure Of Government Failure: A Critical Realist Agenda – to the London Realist Workshop on 1st December 2017, at SOAS, University of London.

Abstract: Using water services as reference, this paper addresses a knowledge gap that is preventing progress in the debate on public service reform: we do not have a good theory of relative organisational efficiency under natural monopoly. First, I offer an historical overview of the conventional theory, illustrating how government failure replaced market failure as the dominant tradition in the field. Second, I discuss the explanatory limitations of theories of government failure – such as public choice, property rights and transaction cost economics – with specific attention to deductivism, linear causality and reductionism. Third, I argue that the failure of government failure is not only a failure of prediction but also of morality and prescription. Finally, I sketch elements of a critical realist agenda aimed at enabling theoretical progress beyond the failure of government failure.

2nd November 2017

An exhibition featuring the work of ISRF Early Career Fellow Jill Gibbon will run 2-25 November 2017 at the Platform Arts gallery in Belfast.

“And This Too features seven artists whose work explores, represents or challenges our understanding of contemporary conflict. Their work reflects the diverse and complex issues which surround responses to conflict and includes drawing, painting, sculpture and installation. Much of this work is being exhibited for the first time in Belfast. The exhibition highlights the important role which artists play in offering alternative viewpoints of conflict. Art can change our perceptions or increase our understanding of events. This is crucial given the current state of heightened security in which we find ourselves.”

The symposium – titled Emotions, Ideologies, and Violent Political Mobilization – “aims to go beyond structural and material explanations of conflict and mobilization. […] Contributions focus on agency and provide diverse angles on the relations between emotions, ideologies, and political violence”.

The ISRF Book Launch Fund is available to existing or previous ISRF award recipients, who may apply for one grant of up to £500 towards the cost of holding an event at which their book (or a book to which they have contributed significantly) is launched.

21st October 2017

An exhibition resulting from the ISRF-funded Layers in the Landscape project will open with a launch event at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David’s Lampeter Campus on Friday 3rd November, 4-7pm.

Accompanying this will be an extended seminar explaining the ongoing research behind the exhibition, including a showing of a short film which explores some of the stories and science around Cardigan Bay, along with an evening performance by Three Legg’d Mare who will present the latest branch of the project; in music. The event will be chaired by Professor Mererid Hopwood.

19th October 2017

An exhibition featuring work by ISRF Early Career Fellow Jill Gibbon will run at the James Hockey Gallery in Farnham – part of the University for the Creative Arts – from 19th October 2017 until 10th January 2018.

“The sketchbooks in this exhibition were drawn undercover in arms fairs in Europe and the Middle East. Arms fairs are trade shows where military and security equipment are promoted to an international clientele. Tanks, ammunition, and tear gas are all on show, and between the bombs, tables are laid with champagne and canapés. Jill gets inside these events by dressing up as an arms trader; her performance a metaphor for the wider masquerade of respectability in the industry.”

5th October 2017

Abstract: Since the great financial crisis of 2007-8, central banks have played an increasingly important and broad role in macroeconomic management in the UK, Europe, and US. Within democratic societies, the role of technocratic institutions in setting economic policy raises important normative questions of justice and justification. This lecture considers some of these issues relating to the role of central banks, paying special attention to forms of unconventional monetary policy such as ‘quantitative easing’.

2nd October 2017

ISRF Political Economy Research Fellow Jurgen De Wispelaere will his discuss his experience of working with basic income experiments in countries like Finland, at an event hosted by RSA Scotland and CBINS.

They Say: “Jurgen will highlight the learning which has been developed from these experiments, address areas which Scotland will need to explore and offer up thoughts for the future development of basic income in our country.”

“The world is awash with weapons. The wars of the twentieth century have skewed manufacturing in the US, Russia, France, Germany, China, and the UK towards military production. At the end of the Cold War there was a brief opportunity to diversify into other areas; instead arms companies merged into multinationals and started selling to almost anyone who would buy. Arms fairs were established in the 1990s to provide international venues for these deals.”

7th August 2017

Kristian Haug interviewed ISRF Political Economy Research Fellow Jurgen De Wispelaere about his research on universal basic income (UBI), for the non-profit news website Truthout.

They Say: “In this interview, De Wispelaere outlines the most important aspects of UBI — its feasibility, what we can learn from previous experiments, why the right implementation is so important and how UBI touches our basic philosophy of human nature. De Wispelaere’s core argument is that the best reason for pursuing the UBI agenda is ending poverty.”

“What is needed in England and Wales is not tinkering with a privatised system that has failed to deliver on its promises but radically changing the priorities of water operators so that people come before profit. By abolishing the payment of dividends and lowering the cost of financing investment, nationalisation can do just that.”

“The liberal philosophy which underpins much of our criminal justice system is committed to protecting individual rights and freedoms. Liberalism, by its nature, is deeply suspicious of state power and wary of the idea that the community should play a bigger role in criminal justice. Ian Loader calls this ‘the liberalism of fear’ and says it’s the reason why there’s such a divide between the views of the public, politicians and practitioners.”

Listen Now:

17th February 2017

From April 2017, Josephine Lethbridge will be The Conversation’s Interdisciplinary Editor, funded by the ISRF. Josephine’s role will include working with scholars at The Conversation’s member universities, as well as past and present Fellows of the ISRF, to bring interdisciplinary social research to millions of readers worldwide. Josephine will encourage researchers to write short newsworthy articles, working with them to produce pieces with journalistic flair but no loss of academic rigour. The ISRF hope that, by promoting interdisciplinarity through this partnership with The Conversation, the usefulness of interdisciplinary approaches will reach broader audiences, and that knowledge of such work will spread beyond the confines of academia.

“The editors were welcomed by Dr Kai-Uwe Schrogl, Head of the Relations with Member States Department in the Director General’s Cabinet, and about 20 other distinguished guests – including the Director of the Paris office of the German Aerospace Agency, Dr Isabelle Reutzel.

Dr Hoerber started by outlining the achievements of the standing ESSCA space policy research group so far. After a timid start with a first special issue in Space Policy (2012), two rather ground-breaking books have been released, one on European Space Policy, edited by Paul Stephenson and Thomas Hoerber (Routledge, 2016) and the above-mentioned Theorizing European Space Policy, on which the book lauch event focused.”

The ISRF Book Launch Fund is available to existing or previous ISRF award recipients, who may apply for one grant of up to £500 towards the cost of holding an event at which their book (or a book to which they have contributed significantly) is launched.

Introduction: Grime is a specifically English musical genre. What started out as a niche practice that articulated the lived experiences of young black men from a particular place, is now an endeavour that attracts a national and international audience. A diaspora cultural form, Grime has been nourished by its black Atlantic connections to the Caribbean, Africa and North America. In this presentation, I reflect on the influence of Reggae on Grime musical production.

“Billed as the only festival that doesn’t require wellies, the Leeds Beckett Media Research Festival (#lebeme) demonstrated live Cuban dancing, took us behind the iron curtain on the back on LP covers, gave us shocking insight into the secret space of arms-fairs, made us think critically about our fitness apps, engaged us in protests, had us question the contemporary nature of recycling, and more! The real success of the day lay in the rich interdisciplinary exchange and networking that took place. Media research is alive and well and is certainly a site for cross- fertilisation of disciplinary work championed by the ISRF.”

The ISRF Book Launch Fund is available to existing or previous ISRF award recipients, who may apply for one grant of up to £500 towards the cost of holding an event at which their book (or a book to which they have contributed significantly) is launched.

22nd December 2016

The Independent Social Research Foundation and Organization Studies awarded the 2016 ISRF Essay Prize in Organisation Studies to Simon Stevens (Loughborough University) for his essay Life and Letting Die: A story of the homeless, autonomy, and anti-social behaviour, to be published online in the Organization Studies OnlineFirst listing in January 2017.

12th December 2016

The PeN project – led by ISRF Mid-Career Fellow Julie Parsons – is being hosted at LandWorks, an independent charity that provides a supported route back into the community for current and ex-prisoners (trainees). The PeN project aims are twofold, to work as a personal development tool for trainees, whilst fostering dialogue between trainees and supporters in order to challenge social exclusion.

Support and involvement from the community is vital for successful resettlement, not least in accepting the ‘reformed’ prisoner. Indeed, social reaction is essential, with positive change in behaviour recognised by others and reflected back. This is done on a daily basis at LandWorks between staff, visitors and trainees, but the PeN project broadens this positive reinforcement. Moreover, it enables the 1000+ supporters and wider community to feel more involved, as one of the supporter’s comments “finding ways to make supporters feel valued, without taking time and resources away from trainees is tricky. I’m optimistic the PeN project will really help”

Trainees are provided with basic digital cameras to take photograph whilst they are on site (only). Photographs and accompanying narratives are then posted on the PeN project blog by the lead researcher, as prisoners are not permitted any access to social media. There are no identifying photographs posted on the blog and all participants choose pseudonyms (fake names). Any photographs taken by trainees are discussed with the lead researcher and decisions made on what photographs and narratives to upload.

For example, Matthew (a 22-year-old trainee) – in his blog post entitled ‘choices’ – took a picture of work he’d been spray painting on to the door of the ‘art department’.

Matthew says:

I’m doing a mural… and it’s, basically it’s a path which splits into two, and it’s all about your decisions, like choices, like you’ve got the left path which is crime and all the s**t, and you’ve got the right path, which is you know trying to make a change, and then when it goes in here, inside there, you’ll see the path there splits again… and then you’ve got the right side, which you can stay doing what you’re doing, like well, not doing what you’re doing, like where I am now yeah, which comes off level, well, which comes off down this way a bit, but if you go in on the right like, you’re on the benefits, and you’re trying to sort s**t out, and then you’ve got another path which comes up, which is your path with a job, your own place, mortgage, and then yeah, that sort of thing… depending on what choice you make depends on where your life goes, basically… yeah, because that door’s open yeah, in the prison system the people are so used to closing doors on people, open the door you know, let them have a chance to walk through that door you know, it’s kinda, it’s trying to go positive… [it’s called] choices… it’s a door that’s open on a door…

In his post ‘no pressure’, Rodney – a 19-year-old trainee on a community sentence – took lots of photographs of what the ‘LandWorks family’ had been working on together.

Roger says:

I did construction skills, level 1 and level 2… level 1 was just pass/fail and we did carpentry, joinery, plumbing, electrics, er… brick work, block work, plastering, rendering, and then level 2 was pass, merit, distinction, and I got an overall merit, but I got distinctions for technical drawing and electrical installation… but see back then it was just easy… I can’t remember any of it for the life of me, whereas with the carpentry… it’s just, and I really didn’t, I used to hate carpentry, I could not stand it, I couldn’t do it, it made me angry, you know, I’d do the slightest bit wrong and end up just hammering the chisel straight through [and] out the other side just to make myself feel better and then give up on it, but… I don’t know, I come here and it’s a lot… you know, in college it’s like, well you’ve only got one, don’t mess it up… Here you do something wrong and that’s alright, go grab another bit… I tend to learn a lot better in an environment where there is no pressure… and I think that here there is no pressure whatsoever… really, at all, I mean… the most pressure I’ve ever been under is playing Boules against Nolan…

Graham, a 50-year-old former trainee and now woodwork trainer at LandWorks, is shown woodturning below.

I’ve been here 15 months… so I was coming out here on a ROTL (Release On Temporary Licence/day release) from the local prison for the last 12 months [of my sentence] and I think it was around about Christmas time [last year] that I noticed on the 5 year LandWorks plan… to employ one of the trainees coming out from the prison, which I asked the project manager about, I said is that what I think it is? And he said what do you think it is? I said to employ one of the lads coming out, and he said yeah and I said well I’d like that job then… and he said oh right ok, well I’ll think about that then, and let you know, then we spoke about it after Christmas… this was last year, and then I think it was about February that he said it was all agreed with the Trustees so here I am… All of this building was like my erm apprenticeship for the job if you like… can you put it like that? I guess, well that’s what I used to talk to the LandWorks counsellor about… I remember when we were chatting, she’d say, well just get on with it, well make a nice job of it, and the project manager can see what you can do and that, and how you work with the other lads and everything, and that was, well I wouldn’t say it was a plan as such, but it sort of panned out like that, I think… it’s a kind of portfolio, here’s what I can do…

The new PeN blogsite therefore satisfies the two inter-related aims of the PeN project, to share trainees’ photographs and accompanying narratives and to engage supporters and the wider community with the desistance journey. Follow the blog at https://penprojectlandworks.org/blog/

8th November 2016

In April 2016, the ISRF launched its third Flexible Grants for Small Groups competition, aimed at supporting independent-minded researchers from different disciplines who wish to work together towards conceptual innovation in Political Economy – which the ISRF here extends to include the social scientific study of economies across the whole range of the social sciences.

Having received a number of strong proposals, a pool of independent external assessors supported the funding of eight projects.

19th October 2016

On 18th October 2016, Routledge published Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise – the first book to foreground and develop a complex reading of the socio-economic significance of urban music with particular reference to grime. The book is the culmination of five years of fieldwork – which included an ISRF Independent Scholar Fellowship – and features interviews and ‘behind the scenes’ observation in the UK and in Cyprus.

13th June 2016

Former ISRF Mid-Career Fellow Jayne Raisborough – whose ISRF project investigated the real world problems associated with anti-ageing culture – has been appointed to the Chair in Media at Leeds Beckett University, commencing from September 2016.

The move sees Jayne leaving the University of Brighton’s School of Applied Social Sciences for Leeds Beckett’s School of Cultural Studies and Humanities.

This section invites discussions of the relationship between economics and business ethics. Conventional economic theories about firms and the people involved in them encourage a very narrow focus on profit and monetary incentives. Yet the reality of business is far more complex, and the consequences of ethical or unethical economic behaviour are far-reaching. How can the discipline of economics—and the teaching of economics within business schools–more adequately address issues of business ethics? Are there concerns of economists, either conventional or critical, that business ethicists should take more seriously? Authors submitting to this section are welcome to explore these questions from philosophical or historical perspectives, offer conceptual insights, and/or use quantitative or qualitative methods of empirical analysis.

The University of Lincoln School of Social and Political Sciences is currently advertising for a part-time, fixed term Research Assistant to work on this project. The closing date for applications is Friday 13 May 2016 – click here for further details.

4th May 2016

Mike Neary & Joss Winn recently presented a paper and poster at the Co-operative Education Conference in Manchester (21-22 April 2016), which will form the basis for two journal articles to be submitted later in the year.

30th April 2016

Former ISRF Early Career Fellow Lara Montesinos Coleman – whose ISRF project revolved around the themes of dissent and resistance, the politics of knowledge, feminist theory, and the political sociology of development and violence – has been promoted to Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex.

30th April 2016

In celebration of the HAU Books re-release of Marcel Mauss’ The Gift (newly translated by Jane Guyer, and with a new foreword by Bill Maurer), SOAS, University of London hosted a panel discussion – featuring, among others, ISRF Academic Advisor Marilyn Strathern and former ISRF Early Career Fellow Jacob Copeman – to reflect on the question: “What did The Gift give to anthropology and the humanities, and what can it still give?”

What is it that underlies the growing public interest in the figure of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe? Sobukwe has been the subject of a form of historical amnesia – indeed, of a consensus of forgetting – in South Africa for at least the last 20 years. One way of appreciating both the force and importance of the retrieval of this historical legacy is by treating Sobukwe not merely as a biographical narrative or historical persona, but as a signifier. Sobukwe, I argue, functions precisely as a signifier for a cluster of ideas and aspirations routinely excluded – indeed, repressed – from the post-apartheid public sphere. I begin by exploring the various ways in which the signifier Sobukwe has been marginalized, disavowed, reduced (often to a crude form of anti-whiteism), and overwritten by rival political interests. Sobukwe, I suggest, haunts the post-apartheid historical situation; his memory is a reminder of those dimensions of political freedom that remain unattained.Ultimately, however, Sobukwe is not merely a repressed signifier; his name functions as a master signifier for an alternative political future. Sobukwe operates today as one prospective name for a more encompassing project of decolonization that expands beyond the given political and institutional structures of the post-apartheid condition.

28th April 2016

Dr Martin Bates (University of Wales, Trinity Saint David), recipient of an ISRF Flexible Grants for Small Groups award in 2016 for his project Layers in the Landscape: Deep Mapping in Cardigan Bay, is currently leading a team of research staff from the School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology in examining a large red deer skull and antlers believed to be around 4000 years old.

This is a wonderful discovery that really brings the forest and its environs to light. It is wonderful that this find was reported to us so that we could recover these remains for scientific study rather than it ending up on the wall in somebody’s house, lost to the world much as it has been for the last 4000 years.

Dr Martin Bates

The ISRF-funded project aims to combine a group of specialists from diverse fields (artist, storyteller, philologist, geoarcheologist, songwriter and poet) to create a new understanding regarding the interplay of flooding facts and fictions in Cardigan Bay. The recent deer skull find may now play a central role in this project.

21st April 2016

On 31 March 2016, a participatory research workshop ‘Anti-Street Harassment Workshop: Reflecting Diversity in Tactics’ was held in Cairo. This workshop was sponsored by the Independent Social Research Foundation and organized by Elisa Wynne-Hughes (Cardiff University), Jutta Weldes and Karen Desborough (University of Bristol). The workshop brought together members of anti-street harassment groups Hollaback! London and HarassMap (Cairo) to compare the strategies they use to address and combat street harassment in different contexts.

Martin’s work on wealth sharing featured in The University of York’s research showcase YorkTalks 2016:

12th April 2016

Flexible Grants for Small Groups recipients Ruth Kinna & Gillian Whitely will convene a workshop on Art, Activism and Political Violence at the University of Lancaster in September 2016, for which papers are sought (to be submitted by Friday 6th May).

This workshop is the result of a collaboration between colleagues in the Anarchism Research Group and the Politicised Practice Research Group at Loughborough University and is designed to build new relationships between artists and political theorists and to explore questions of political violence and art activism.

31st March 2016

Dr Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck, University of London), recipient of an ISRF Mid-Career Fellowship in 2014 for her project Time Without Qualities, has received a Wellcome Trust Seed Award in in Humanities and Social Science grant for a continuation of her research. The project – Waiting Times: Waiting and Care in the Time of Modernity – will investigate waiting times in relation to mental health, clinical contact time and care, bringing together perspectives from medical humanities, medical history, psychosocial studies, literary studies and new studies of temporality, to think critically about waiting times in mental healthcare provision, the time-space of the GP encounter and practices of care for very elderly people.

30th March 2016

At a meeting at Nice in France – 19-21 November 2015 – the ISRF consulted with a small group of social scientists, students, and others concerned with economics, about ways forward for it as both discipline and profession. What emerged was a strong emphasis on the need for support to methodological pluralism in economics, and for broadening the reach of economics research into areas such as the family and kinship, the firm, business and money; that is, in directions which would naturally involve work with other disciplines. Equally important were the complex and considerable institutional barriers to disciplinary and professional change, and the state of affairs in economics teaching where the student voice is insistent in its demand for a broader and more relevant economics curriculum.

The articles in the latest ISRF Bulletin – Economics: …Serious, But Not Hopeless – were chosen to give a sense of the content of that meeting; of the ideas that were raised, the issues that came up for discussion, the concerns raised about institutional inertia and the over-narrow education and professional formation of future economists. The conversations begun at Nice are a first step in an ongoing process of consultation which the ISRF will continue.

29th March 2016

Writing in Canadian national newspaper The Globe and Mail, former ISRF Early Career Fellow Audra Mitchell and co-author Jessica West discuss the race to claim ownership of outer space minerals.

The Space Act was specifically designed to generate a race for space minerals by stimulating competition and private investment in space flight and space-based mining technologies. Michael Byers of the University of British Columbia recently called for Canada to create similar legislation to maintain dominance as a mining country. But we argue that Canada should, instead, lead in developing new frameworks for the peaceful and sustainable use of outer space.

Abstract

A global extinction crisis may threaten the survival of most existing life forms. Influential discourses of ‘existential risk’ suggest that human extinction is a real possibility, while several decades of evidence from conservation biology suggests that the Earth may be entering a ‘sixth mass extinction event’. These conditions threaten the possibilities of survival and security that are central to most branches of International Relations. However, this discipline lacks a framework for addressing (mass) extinction. From notions of ‘nuclear winter’ and ‘omnicide’ to contemporary discourses on catastrophe, International Relations thinking has treated extinction as a superlative of death. This is a profound category mistake: extinction needs to be understood not in the ontic terms of life and death, but rather in the ontological context of be(com)ing and negation. Drawing on the work of theorists of the ‘inhuman’ such as Quentin Meillassoux, Claire Colebrook, Ray Brassier, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Nigel Clark, this article provides a pathway for thinking beyond existing horizons of survival and imagines a profound transformation of International Relations. Specifically, it outlines a mode of cosmopolitics that responds to the element of the inhuman and the forces of extinction. Rather than capitulating to narratives of tragedy, this cosmopolitics would make it possible to think beyond the restrictions of existing norms of ‘humanity’ to embrace an ethics of gratitude and to welcome the possibility of new worlds, even in the face of finitude.

1st January 2016

In July 2015, the ISRF launched its third Independent Scholar Fellowship competition. Having received a number of strong proposals, the Selection Panel met in December 2015, and voted to make three awards.

31st December 2015

Former ISRF Early Career Fellow Jacob Copeman has co-edited (with Veena Das) a special issue of the South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, entitled ‘On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation’.

16th November 2015

ISRF Editorial Assistant Dr Rachael Kiddey spoke with Professor Olivier Favereau from the University of Paris West to discuss French Nobel Prize winner Jean Tirole’s intervention in the opening of a new academic department of economics.

30th June 2015

The Independent Social Research Foundation and the Cambridge Journal of Economics awarded the 2015 ISRF Essay Prize in Economics to Professor Julie A. Nelson (University of Massachusetts, Boston) for her essay Husbandry: A (Feminist) Reclamation of Masculine Responsibility for Care, published online in the Cambridge Journal of Economics’ advance access listing in Autumn 2015.

1st May 2015

In November 2014, the ISRF launched its first Flexible Grants for Small Groups competition. Having received a number of strong proposals, a pool of independent external assessors supported the funding of nine projects.

1st January 2015

In July 2014, the ISRF launched its second Independent Scholar Fellowship competition. Having received a number of strong proposals, the Selection Panel met in December 2014, and voted to make two awards.

1st October 2013

In August 2013, the ISRF launched its first Independent Scholar Fellowship competition. Having received a number of strong proposals, the Selection Panel met in September 2013, and voted to make two awards.